BrainSTEM CVI – A Child’s Reach Initiative

What is CVI?

Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) is a disorder caused by damage to the parts of the brain that process vision. It’s most common in babies and young children, but can continue into adulthood.

A child with CVI has vision problems that are caused by their brain that can’t be explained by a problem with their eyes. Normally, the eyes send electrical signals to the brain, and the brain turns those signals into the images you see. If you have CVI, your brain has trouble processing and understanding these signals.

How did BrainSTEM Robotics Team got involved?

It’s more than robots! We strive to break the social, economic, educational, and medical borders placed around disadvantaged people and communities. We organize many outreach programs in an effort to encourage young people into STEM fields. In one such outreach program, we visited the Child’s Way Daycare Center, part of the Children’s Home of Pittsburgh, to demonstrate robots to the medically fragile children there, only to realize that their gross and fine-motor impairment prevents them to interact with many commercial educational toys. We decided to help and started the Child’s Reach Initiative; a BrainSTEM program that focuses on alleviating these physical barriers so that these kids to can have access to the same opportunities as their peers.

Through interviews with the Center’s Director and the Learning Specialist, developed a learning tool using our robotics knowledge that allowed children with motor impairment to interact with it via customized interfaces.

Connected and received feedback from biotech entrepreneurs, physical therapy professionals, and experts in pediatric care to advance the product design to include new technologies (wireless interfaces, backlit display, client/server web application, cloud storage.)

These design improvements caught the attention of Dr. Christine Roman-Lantzy of Pediatric VIEW Program at the Children’s Home who saw a use case of our prototype for children with CVI.

The BrainSTEM CVI App

The BrainSTEM CVI App was designed to address challenges faced by both the TVIs (Teachers of the Visually Impaired) and the parents of the children with CVI.
Many children with CVI also have fine motor impairment. The app makes use of the custom-designed 3D-printed wireless interfaces for easy interaction.
Can be accessed from home, school or hospital.
Constantly expanding Salient Features Image Database through a companion CVI Image Database Update Tool.
Encourages engagement through visual and audible instant feedback, including displaying the Salient features on the image.
Through different play modes, reinforce learning: Learn a particular target through a series of challenges featuring that target with a randomized set of comparable images; or pick a category and the app will bring up a new challenge randomly within that category of images.

Features for Impact

For parents, this allows your child to practice at home.
The interfaces were designed such that the child can select the target in question, commit the answer, receive feedback, and repeat all by themselves.
Different interfaces available for different motor impairments including wheelchair mounted interfaces.
Can display on a big TV at home.
Access to an ever-growing image database with salient features included. We use the Salient Feature Dictionary to generate these images, as well.
For TVIs and clinicians, monitor progress of a particular child by interpreting the usage data collected by the BrainSTEM CVI App (under development).
May be used for assessment through the use of Levels.
Families may add their own images with salient features customized for their child (under development). Useful to recognize pets or household items that are special for the child.

Planned future improvements:

New game modes with increasing difficulty (comparison against more images.)
Use of Text-to-Speech for the target in the challenge and its salient features.
Option to introduce backgrounds for each target image with varying levels of complexity.